I’m trying to decide between a browser-based interface and a native interface for my app.
Can someone help me complete a list of Pro’s and Cons?
All the questions around this subject always end up with replies like ‘web apps are easier to deploy or update’, so to make it very clear: the app will run locally on the user’s machine, it’s not running on a server.
Example:
Web Gui
- Pros: Users can bookmark parts of the application
- Cons: Keyboard accelerators often don’t work
Native Gui
- Pros: Application are integrated (can be minimized to system tray,etc)
- Cons: You have to create one for each platform (Win/Mac/Android/etc)
I seriously doubt if anything that is answered here would help you much. If you apparently cannot think of a comprehensive list of cons and pros yourself, you apparently don’t know about opportunities and bottlenecks on each platform. There are many factors to this decision, and a choice cannot be made based on a general list anyone would post here, without knowing what you want to build.
If I were to give you a choice, build a server application. Build an application that can be controlled by REST calls. If that application works, you can choose to build a Desktop GUI, a web GUI or maybe both. The UI should be just a small part of your application after all, and you wouldn’t want to have to rewrite all of the application if you needed to switch from Web to Desktop or vice versa.